Jan Vallone Article--The Seattle Times

Read Jan Vallone's recent article in The Seattle Times:

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/mobile/?type=story&id=2015289212&

Pieces of Someday Wins Two Literary Awards

Pieces of Someday has won two Reader Views Reviewers Choice Awards.  It placed first nationally in the memoir category and first across genres in the Pacific region.

http://www.readerviews.com/Awards2010Winners.html

Pieces of Someday Selected Finalist for Literary Award

Pieces of Someday has been selected a finalist for the 2011 Reader Views Reviewers Choice Award.
http://www.readerviews.com/Awards2010Finalists.html

Review from Reader Views

Pieces of Someday

Jan Vallone

Gemelli Press (2010)

ISBN 9780982102350

Reviewed by Olivera Baumgartner-Jackson for Reader Views (12/10)

Jan Vallone’s “Pieces of Someday” is an extraordinary book. Memoirs of my contemporaries rarely impress me, unless those people have done something absolutely outstanding, and I would seldom choose to read such memoirs. “Pieces of Someday” was a true exception. Even if I would not have cared for the story – but I did! – I would have read this for the sheer beauty of Ms. Vallone’s writing. Consider this passage: “In those days, I often had a dream, sometimes still do. I’m in a house, climbing stairs, walking hallways. Rarely, it’s modern, picture-windowed; more often Tudor, dark beamed with leaded panes. Its halls are lined with doors knobbed in iron, pewter, glass. I choose a brass knob like a flower, enter a chamber with deep violet walls. Window light filters through an oak tree casting shifting shadows upon another door. I open to a second room, rose red, then another, another, another – green, saffron, flax blue – a Russian Babushka doll of rooms, my heart, a hummingbird.” I was left speechless after so many passages like the aforementioned one, overcame by the sheer beauty and power of them. “… doors knobbed in iron, pewter, glass…”, what a beautiful departure from the “different knobs on the doors”…

Set in New York, Seattle and Italy, this memoir explores a quest for happiness, balance and truth as one woman saw it. While her story is utterly believable and relatable, it is also astonishingly unique and unquestionably delightful. The writing style alone would make me think extremely favorably about “Pieces of Someday,” but then Jan Vallone did something even more extraordinary. She made me care about her life, her struggles and her search for who she was/is and who she truly wanted to be. Few stones were left unturned in her keen explorations of who, what, where, when and why. Her candid musings on the true essence of beauty, the price of career and the search for balance, the importance and meaning of religion, the proper ways to teach and on the many kinds of love were awe-inspiring and oftentimes poignant. Her eye for detail, her ability to bring all the senses to life in a very vivid way, her sharp dialogue and even the truly surprising epilogue made me wish Ms. Vallone’s “Pieces of Someday” would never end. But end it did, leaving me amazed and joyful, as true beauty always will. This is a book that everybody could relate to, and I would recommend it highly to anybody who takes pleasure in the beauty of a well written sentence – or many of them.

Interview from Writing It Real

Here's an interview on Pieces of Someday and writing that appeared in Writing It Real:

http://www.writingitreal.com/cgi-bin/get_article.pl?ID=551

Wonderful Review

I'm very excited to share the first review that's appeared on my memoir, Pieces of Someday, which was published in January. Greg Wolfe, who wrote the review, is highly respected, so his praise means a lot to me. He is the founder and editor of IMAGE, a leading literary quarterly, directs the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing at Seattle Pacific University and has served as a judge for the National Book Awards. He has published many books and essays. His interest is what he calls the intersection of faith and art, so that's the angle he focuses on in the review. Here is the text:

Pieces of Someday by Jan Vallone

Memoir is a literary form that is an endless source of controversy. Some consider it inherently narcissistic while others argue that it will replace the novel as the primary form of serious literary prose. But there is one point that many people can agree upon: the rise of memoir as an art form has demonstrated that it isn't the fame of the author--or her wild adventures or bizarre life experiences--that makes for a good story. Rather, great memoirs are characterized by the quality of their attention to the universal, quotidian experiences of human life--and the honest, courageous exploration of the self, proverbial warts and all. By this measure, Jan Vallone's memoir, Pieces of Someday, is a wonderful addition to the literature. A New York Italian-American with a complicated relationship to her father, Vallone ignores her early artistic impulses to adopt her father's profession--the law. Marriage, a vintage house, and worldly success follow, but prove inadequate. Vallone's struggles with infertility and her decision to adopt, her growing frustration with lawyering and her mid-life shift to teaching literature and creative writing in an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva, turn her world upside down. Teaching and children provide her with a deep sense of fulfillment but come with their own griefs, tensions, and uncertainties. And then faith makes an entrance, in the form of her return to the Catholic Church she has known and not-known throughout her life. As Vallone's memoir opens, she's sitting in church, wondering about her life. A childhood friend has told her that life is a circle; her father made her feel that it is a linear path. But sitting in the pew she decides that it is more like stained glass: "composed of bits of translucency and opacity--fragments of yesterday, chips of today, pieces of someday, soldered with time. Some jewel-like and whole. Some fractured by the weather.... Only fusion and repair complete the image and allow us to make out the picture." Vallone's narrative gift--by turns lyrical, funny, and raw--combined with her newfound awareness of grace provide the "fusion and repair" that renders a life whole and meaningful. Read about her life and gain new insight into yours.

You can sign up for Image Update--a great resource--here: http://imagejournal.org/imageupdate/192_100414.html

Writing in Community

One of the last things my father did before he died in 1994 was dictate a story into a tape recorder. He was seventy years old, had retired only months earlier and had spent those months pursuing long-deferred dreams. One of those dreams was to take a creative writing course. My father had always considered himself a raconteur. No longer able to attend classes or sit up to type or write by hand, my father completed his last story from his hospital bed, using the tape recorder.

Like my father, I’ve always enjoyed writing, and, like my father, I postponed doing anything about it for the majority of my life. But I decided several years ago that I was no longer going to wait. After eighteen years of practicing law, I left my firm, went back to school and became a high school English teacher at a yeshiva—an Orthodox Jewish high school. Teaching English kept me in constant communion with the world’s great writers, both classic and contemporary. By immersing myself in their voices, I hoped to develop my own and help my students develop theirs.

I loved teaching writing to teenagers. The writing teacher is confidant. The writing teacher is mentor. The writing teacher is cheerleader. The writing teacher is the center of a community composed of people striving to reach others, the facilitator of human connection, and, as such, experiences the joy of being touched.

My students quickly figured out that their teacher was an idealistic and sentimental person. I told them that their goal as writers was to enable their readers to live vicariously, to gather insights about life. I explained that they wouldn’t be able to reach this goal unless they allowed their work to be inspired by what moved them, both intellectually and emotionally. I urged them to write from their hearts.

I meant what I said to my students, and they actually seemed to believe me. Take, for example, Zach. As a senior, he asked me if he could do an independent study course in writing, an opportunity not normally available at our school. I agreed, if he would do two things: (1) revise a rough but promising memoir he had written in my class as a junior and (2) submit it to a writers’ contest sponsored by a leading magazine. For the next eight weeks, Zach and I met regularly to work on his story. I commented; he revised. We did this over and over, and when the story became more polished, we solicited comments from friends and family. Again he revised. The result was a poignant piece about the night that Zach’s brother died, which Zach submitted to the contest. Later, he described the outcome in a speech to an audience of teens whose loved ones were ill:

A couple months later I heard I was a finalist and that during school the next day I’d find out what I had won and where I had placed. I received a phone call at lunch telling me that over 10,000 applicants had entered and I had placed second. Needless to say, my jaw dropped, and when I told my teacher, we were so overwhelmed we couldn’t push down our smiles. Then I began to think what about it is so special? Winning is fun but writing is not exactly a soccer game; the thrill of winning is not the same. Then, as I thought about it, I realized that my story is going to be published and distributed in over eight million homes worldwide. If in one of those homes one person will read my story and possibly be consoled or gain an insight from it, then I will have done what I thought could not be done, I will have brought hope and optimism out of something that I thought would only be sad and depressing.

When that hit me, the excitement and thought of winning was secondary to the idea that I might be able to help someone who otherwise may not have been reached on that same level.

How proud I was of Zach, and how personally gratified. For Zach had learned—miraculously from me—several things about writing that I believe and had taught him: writing is a process, and although it begins in the individual heart and depends on the individual writer’s toil and perseverance, it often develops within a community of supportive writers and readers who are willing to react and comment as the writer, through repeated revision, brings the piece to completion. Thus, most good writing is a joint effort. Collaboration is what gives writing its special, and to my mind, greatest potential: to work positive change not only on the writer, but also on the community that reads.

Now, amazingly, it’s my turn. My first book, Pieces of Someday, a memoir, has just been released by Gemelli Press, a small Seattle publisher. The memoir is the product of four years of work on my part, and like Zach’s story, countless hours of writing and revision. Also, like Zach’s story, my memoir would not today exist were it not for the community of people who inspired me to write it, and who read it, commented on it and cheered for me as I wrote.  I now offer them heartfelt thanks.

Thank you.

Roxana Arama, Teresa Daggett, Bea Gates, Elena Georgiou, Les Lamkin, Jocelyn Lieu, Gwen Mansfield, Sean Roberts, David Sobel—

for your encouragement and invaluable comments;

Cristina Rinaldi—

per la tua amicizia e la piu` bella copertina che io abbia mai visto;

Jason Enterline—

for your beautiful print design and limitless patience;

Barbara Elliott and Fr. Michael Fones—

for assuring me that even I have gifts;

Rick Hamlin, Bill Hesse, Kari Hock, Nan Holmes, Steve Kaufman, Karen Landes—

for opening doors;

Fr. Tom Kraft, Jesson Mata and Fr. Daniel Syverstad—

for personifying love, hope and perseverance;

Akiva, Jack, Chelsea, Mira, Zach, Shoshana G., Shoshana R.

and the writers of Goddard Port Townsend—

for sharing your words and light; and

Mark, Cristin and Sean—

for more than words can say;

I love you so.

Posted by

Jan Vallone